How do we keep someone happy?

March 6, 2018March 7, 2018

We must understand we cannot make people happy. Temporary we can create a feeling of joy and content, but that is not happiness. Our tentatives of keeping people happy are degenerating after all in attachments, and we do more harm than good. When we are trying to keep our spouse happy for instance, we practically become fake. We are becoming others’ slaves in the name of love and happiness. We do things that we do not want to do, and that is a dangerous game because sooner or later we cannot fake it any longer. Then our spouses would say that we have changed and they do not love us anymore. Everyone must find happiness through self-awareness. That is happiness. Everything else is surrogate that could mimic happiness for one or ten or fifty minutes. We buy a car; we may be “happy” for a day or two. We buy a house that can go for a week or two, but in the end, this mechanism is at fault. We are happy beings, we have been born happy, and within the life process going on we forgot, and we have started chasing happiness. The thing is that we do not look to find happiness but we search for what we have been told is happiness. We see actors and other wealthy people on TV, and we believe that if we would be like them, we will be happy. Always we condition happiness and that is not the definition of happiness. Still, we look at the happiness that will happen in the future, or it is something that we have lost from the past. That is the refusal to be happy. Lao-Tzu beautifully said: “If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.”

With all this said we have to learn love, acceptance, and forgiveness. All these lessons will build a healthy relationship, and there will be no need to find solutions to problems that do not exist. We must listen to the old proverb “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” When we build a great relationship with people around us, we do not need to make them happy. They will just remember happiness, and we all will live in peace and harmony. That piece of music within us will drive us to enlightenment and evolution. With the understanding of happiness, none of us would need entertainment and enslavement from others to stay happy.